Contributions of age of start, cognitive abilities and practice to musical task performance in childhood

Studies with adult musicians show that beginning lessons before age seven is associated with better performance on musical tasks and enhancement in auditory and motor brain regions. It is hypothesized that early training interacts with periods of heightened neural development to promote greater plasticity and better learning and performance later in life. However, we do not know whether such effects can be observed in childhood. Moreover, we do not know the degree to which such effects are related to training, or whether early training has different effects on particular musical skills depending on their cognitive, perceptual or motor requirements. To address these questions, we compared groups of child musicians who had started lessons earlier or later on age-normed tests of rhythm synchronization and melody discrimination. We also matched for age, years of experience, working memory and global cognitive ability. Results showed that children who started early performed better on simple melody discrimination and that scores on this task were predicted by both age of start (AoS) and cognitive ability. There was no effect of AoS for the more complex rhythm or transposed melody tasks, but these scores were significantly predicted by working memory ability, and for transposed melodies, by hours of weekly practice. These findings provide the first evidence that earlier AoS for music training in childhood results in enhancement of specific musical skills. Integrating these results with those for adult musicians, we hypothesize that early training has an immediate impact on simple melody discrimination skills that develop early, while more complex abilities, like synchronization and transposition require both further maturation and additional training.